$2/gal- Just a Taste of Coming Oil Crash

Read this article and be afraid-- and then get angry at the lies being told to the public.

The bottom line of the article is that global energy use is skyrocketing while little new oil is being discovered:

new sources of oil are becoming increasingly difficult to find and more expensive to develop. Global discovery peaked in 1964 and has declined ever since. In 2000, there were 16 discoveries of oil "mega-fields." In 2001, we found eight, and in 2002 only three such discoveries were made. Today, we consume about six barrels of oil for every one new barrel discovered.

And the numbers you hear out there on available oil are probably lies. The Saudis are lying to us about how much oil they have. The Big Oil companies are lying. And the government is lying.

Take the Saudis:

A second major problem is the fact that the Saudis will not allow any independent third-party observer to examine their reserves, operations and books. It's off-limits and "totally opaque"... Analysts can't even know for sure exactly how much oil the Saudis produce each day.

During the 80s, estimates of OPEC's total reserves magically jumped from 353 to 643 billion barrels, despite the lack of new oil fields or significant improvements in drilling technologies. The Saudis themselves jacked up their stated reserves from 170 to 257 billion barrels.

Matt Simmons has personally pored over 40 years' worth of Saudi petroleum reservoir engineering reports. "I do data analysis," Simmons says. "And the data analysis is getting increasingly scary. We have clearly grossly overstated proved reserves."

As for the big oil companies, when Royal Dutch Shell admitted four months ago that it had been lying to shareholders about how much oil they owned, it was treated as a financial scandal.

But the Shell lies about having more oil than they actually do could just be the tip of the iceberg:

"Most of us can't believe Shell is the only one," says [one analyst]. "Traditionally, they've been very good and conservative in their accounting practices. A bunch of us suspect they are probably just the first to come clean."

What this means is that remaining oil will become increasingly valuable. But it also means the politics of cheap oil will inevitably end. The military costs of protecting oil production, as terrorists increasingly target remaining sites, will just increase the real costs.

We are unlikely to get a real debate on the need to increase energy efficiency across the economy, expand mass transit, and begin reshaping our communities to decrease energy use over the coming decades.

But we desperately need it.

Posted by Nathan at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (0)

Let America Be America Again

This is a brilliant slogan for the Kerry campaign.

What this Langston Hughes poem evokes is leftwing patriotism, a concise statement that leaders who betray the ideals of the country are not patriots but subverters of the nation.

It summarizes the idea that the Bush Presidency is a radical departure from Americanism, while implicit in its text is the idea that there is no ideal to return to, just an ideal we are ever striving to achieve. The end lines are the harshest demands for change possible:

America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

But that's all subtext. It's a bit like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"; some will mistake it for chauvinism, but others will understand the depth of subtle assault on Bush's greedy destruction of this country.

Posted by Nathan at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Track (4)

Cheney Fixed Halliburton Deal

Pretty close to a smoking gun.

Time Magazine found this memo showing that the VP coordinated Halliburton getting the multi-billion dollar contract for Iraq:

The e-mail -- dated March 5, 2003 -- says Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, approved the arrangement to award the contract to the oil-services company, the administration official said.

According to an e-mail excerpt in Time, the contract was "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's office."

The Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract three days later without seeking other bids, Time reports.

Now, the Cheney folks say that the "coordinated" action was just a heads up of potential controversy, but think about it.

Why was the VP's office informed of potential PR problems before the White House itself? Why is the Army Corps of Engineers even dealing directly with PR issues on the taxpayer dime in that case?

If the White House was officially informed of the potential contract, and someone in the political office then called the VP office to worry about PR issues, that would be normal politics.

But this looks like the VP was involved directly in coordinating the politics -- and probably the substance -- of the Halliburton deal.

It's disgusting even in the most favorable light.

Posted by Nathan at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Go See "Control Room"

I saw Control Room, the documentary about the Arab news network Al Jazeera, this weekend. It was stunning.

The anchors and writers for the television network are clearly biased against the US invasion, and they make few bones about this fact. But then, they ask, aren't all the US networks supportive of the US? What's the difference? Isn't "objectivity" a crock?

But that doesn't mean there are no standards. When asked what is the purpose of Al Jazeera, an executive producers says it's showing the truth. Turth is of course biased, but there is at least one clear injunction in that for journalists.

Don't withhold information you know happened.

Al Jazeera passed that test. The US networks failed.

It was Al Jazeera that showed the results of US bombing-- the dead and crippled-- and the deaths of Americans themselves once they invaded. And they showed US soldiers threatening families as they went door to door.

They also showed the other side, the US military side, where they were willing to broadcast statements by the US government as to why everything was happening. As one top US official admits in the documentary, Al Jazeera was willing to broadcase almost any statement they gave them.

Yet Al Jazeera was accused of being deceptive.

Because it didn't censor images unflattering to the US.

Images that the US media, as if they were state-controlled media, dutifully refused to run as part of the war effort.

Who served truth?

Al Jazeera, whatever their bias, at least ran information from both sides of the argument.

The roots of torture at Abu Ghraib can be seen in this documentary, as US reporters refused to ask tough questions and instead became stenographers for Donald Rumsfeld.

At one point, Donald Rumsfeld attacks Al Jazeera, saying of them, once someone starts lying, how can you ever take them seriously.

The crowd in my New York theater, a few blocks from Ground Zero, began laughing derisively.

Yes, Don, how can we take you seriously?

Posted by Nathan at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (0)

Lies and No Child Left Behind

One way to lie is to mischaracterize statements by opponents or answer a question not asked.

Take No Child Left Behind.

Officials across the country, including Republicans in states struggling to implement the reforms required, have complained that the administration has shortchanged them, cutting the education funds originally promised and dumping the additional costs on the states.

So how does the Bush administration respond?

With this breathless press release/campaign propaganda about a report paid for with tax money:

The General Accounting Office (GAO) released a new report Unfunded Mandates: Analysis of Reform Act Coverage that found that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is in fact not an "unfunded mandate," as critics of the law have claimed.

No Child Left Behind costs states money and the federal government hasn't provided them with the funds promised, but the Bushies decide to narrow the question to a technical definition:

According to the report, NCLB '[d]id not meet the UMRA's [Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995] definition of a mandate because the requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance' and 'any costs incurred by state, local or tribal governments would result from complying' with conditions for receiving the funds.

Get that-- since states can give up all the federal money conditioned on following the program, they technically aren't "mandated" to spend extra money.

All true, and a complete distracting lie in the context of the actual criticisms of the program. But that's how these people work.

Posted by Nathan at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Civil Liberties Protect Govt Officials

Why are civil liberties needed?

One answer is that we fear that the worst impulses of humanity will get out of control without the restraining hand of human rights standards.

That is one clear story told by looking at the pictures and reports emerging from Abu Ghraib.

But there is another reason for civil liberties, where we fear an all-too-normal impulse, namely covering your ass, will lead to violations of rights.

Apparently, on top of the indignity of torture at Abu Ghraib, it turns out almost none of the prisoners were linked to the insurgency. And almost no useful intelligence was gained from those prisoners.

So why were these prisoners held so long in such terrible conditions:

In general, said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, many of the prisoners held in the isolation wing at Abu Ghraib were kept there long beyond any period of usefulness because "no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next Osama bin Laden."

This is the best argument against giving officials discretion over our rights.

It's not that they will violate them out of viciousness-- although they may -- but because sacrificing those rights may just be seen as a way to protect their career to avoid blame.

Which is why civil liberties are so useful.

As long as the standards are tough and inflexible, officials cannot be blamed if they follow such standards and release people when they have no proof of their guilt.

Discretion creates a chance to blame such officials, so therefore endangers innocent people deeply, since officials then have to fear for their careers if they, by their own discretion, release a person who later turns out to be guilty, even if there was no real evidence at the time to hold them.

Civil liberties, the "Miranda Rule"-- all get vilified when something goes wrong and a released prisoner commits a crime. Good. Better the abstract principle get blamed then the officials who released them, or otherwise those officials would never release anyone, innocent or guilty.

Posted by Nathan at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Bush Fought Al Qaeda

...and Al Qaeda Won...

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's network, a leading London think-tank says.

Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said on Tuesday.

Remember this antiwar cartoon produced by TomPaine.com before the war? Couldn't have been more accurate:

Posted by Nathan at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | Track (2)

Job Security for SBC Workers

After a short four-day walkout by its workers, SBC has agreed to a contract guaranteeing its employees job security, including transferring employees from declining telephone divisions to new high tech divisions:

The agreement also includes new access to jobs in the growth areas, protects health security for both active employees and retirees, and improves pensions.

The settlement guarantees no layoffs of employees currently on the payroll for the life of the agreement and calls for rehiring of several hundred workers who had been laid off at SBC Southwest and SBC Midwest.

Officials of the nation's No. 2 phone provider said negotiators agreed to provide current CWA-represented employees with a guaranteed job offer should their existing job be no longer needed.

And to make sure that a merger or any kind of sale will not endanger jobs, the contract requires that any successor company must assume these obligations as well.

SBC has always been the most union-friendly of the Baby Bells, so the conflict over this contract had been a bit surprising, but it's nice that the result was still an industry standard.

Posted by Nathan at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (0)

One Win for Sanity

A judge threw out the Justice Department's vendetta against Greenpeace, ruling charges of "sailor mongering" from a 19th century law could not be used against the organization. It was somewhat of a technical victory for civil liberties, but we'll take them where we can these days.

Posted by Nathan at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (0)

Which Conservative Ideology?

Matt Y agrees that GOP power has actually been quite successful in helping the wealthy but this isn't part of conservativism the ideology-- which he equates with "traditional morality and small government."

But the triumph of pro-corporate market fundamentalism is a core part of at least a wing of conservatism, from Milton Friedman to supply side economics to the Federalist Society. These folks always were always more concerned about government protecting property interests than limiting government per se. Look at intellectual property rights-- the economic right has been demanding that China -- China for gods sake-- increase its government repression to get rid of software and entertainment piracy.

That Matt sees this stuff as tangential to "true" conservatism is exactly the point-- like a lot of liberals he's more obsessed with the culture war, while thinking the economic war can be managed once a few good technocrats are put into office under a nice liberal President.

While I'll defend Clinton relative to Reagan and the Bushes and want Kerry to win, Robert Rubin or the equivalent that Kerry will appoint is not going to confront head-on the economic warfare that working people are facing, at both the government level and by private sector corporate organizing. And the fact that liberals don't take the economic component of conservatism seriously enough is exactly why the rightwing can get away with it given the often deadening media silence.

Posted by Nathan at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Track (0)

Comment Problems

My anti-spam software has been acting up and blocking most comments. So I disabled it.

So if you had problems, repost your comments. And excuse the occasional spam advertisement for porn and drugs until I find a replacement solution.

Posted by Nathan at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Wages Lag, Bush Approval Drops

To the chagrin of some Bush boosters, recent GDP and job numbers aren't boosting approval of Bush's handling of the economy. In fact, it's been dropping with a recent poll showing 60% of the population disapproving of his economic management.

Which might be explained by the fact that anemic job growth is matched by stagnant wages for everyone else. Check the wage analysis factoids:

Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages for non-farm workers, excluding managers and executives, rose 25 cents, to $15.35, between 2001 and 2003. That equates to an annual increase of less than 2 percent, or below the rate of inflation.

Labor's share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest for any recovery since the end of World War II.

The kicker of all this is that corporate America is doing phenomenally well:

From the start of 2002 to the end of 2003, national income grew about $804 billion, or 8.7 percent. For the first time, corporate profits received a larger share of the growth than labor did.

Corporate profits, however, were able to experience explosive growth as a consequence of the very large gap between the growth rates of labor productivity and worker earnings.

The median cash compensation for chief executives was up over 7 percent, and that's not including stock options and other long-term incentives, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

So note this, not only were the rich getting their taxes cut, but the total income they were earning was expanding rapidly.

But the GOP still thinks the wealthy need new tax cuts.

Maybe they shouldn't be surprised that the rest of the population thinks they deserve a raise as well-- and see Bush as not delivering the goods for anyone other than his rich buddies.

Posted by Nathan at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (4)

Rightwing on Me and WWP

WorldNetDaily, the popular rightwing online news site, has a full-fledged story on the attacks on critics of the WWP-ANSWER within the left, with a lot on my history within the National Lawyers Guild. They seemed to have combed every email list and web site to piece together the story. Although they didn't bother to even contact me for comment, a pretty shabby failure.

It's not too slanted, since it emphasizes how isolated ideologically the WWP is on the Left and distinguishes the vast numbers who opposed the war versus the tiny clique around WWP-ANSWER who were pro-Saddam.

The article even points out why the media pays more attention to fringe rightwing groups than to Stalinist groups like the WWP-- the rightwing groups are actively murdering people in the US. Quoting one source:

"The far right becomes relevant when it's shooting abortion doctors or blowing up courthouses," he said, "There aren't a lot of leftists blowing things up."

Which of course highlights why the rightwing is kind of silly to itself spend too much time talking breathlessly about fringe groups, when it tolerates Klan allies and abortion doctors in its midst. I wonder how many exposes WND has done on those?

Posted by Nathan at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | Track (5)

Leave No Rich Child Behind

A great title for a Washington Post editorial:

The House of Representatives plans to take up a bill this week that would provide new tax breaks to families earning as much as $309,000, while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale...

Currently, married families with incomes of up to $110,000 receive the full credit; the bill would more than double the income ceiling, to $250,000...

For families earning less than $10,750, however, the House bill would do nothing. Thus, a family with a parent working full-time at the minimum wage ($10,300) would get no benefit from the bill.

This proposal is part of an overall bill that would add an additional $500 billion to the national debt over the next ten years.

These folks are just evil-- handing out trillions to the wealthy, while doing nothing for minimum wage workers and their families.

Posted by Nathan at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

What Liberals Ignore

I get frustrated many times that most liberals equate progressive values with government spending, and ignore how politics effects the private sector - a frustration I share from the opposite end of the spectrum with many conservatives.

Kevin Drum thinks that for all the hype, the conservative movement has been a bit of a failure. Matt Y feels similarly.

The evidence?

Medicaid still exists

Gay rights have advanced

Education spending by the feds has increased

All true, and I'm the first to argue that conservatives have been defeated on a number of fronts, especially on their goal of gutting the welfare state. (They've been distressed to discover how fundamentally popular it is).

But still, this rosy picture ignores what the conservative agenda has accomplished in hurting working people in the private economy:

Rightwing appointments to the NLRB and the courts have helped destroy many unions, leading to a plummeting in union density.

Deregulation has devastated workers in a range of industries, from airlines to trucking to telecoms to the energy industry- just witness the ripoff of consumers in the California energy debacle.

The weakening of labor laws and their enforcement has opened the way for Wal-Mart and its ilk to drive down standards across the economy.

Antitrust laws have been gutted, leading to massive corporate consolidation in a range of industries, including the media.

Changes in banking laws have starved poor communities of credit, led to the rise of predatory lending institutions, and created a global casino in our financial markets.

And the list goes on.

There's a good argument that for the corporate wing of the GOP, all the fireworks over gay marriage and welfare is just a diversion, a way to collect votes, to pursue this pro-corporate agenda.

So arguably, the mainstream conservatives may have been defeated in some of their goals, but the corporate wing-- which funded Ronald Reagan's rise to power -- has been quite successful.

Posted by Nathan at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | Track (6)

Home Ownership Drops For Families

Home ownership rates for low- and moderate-income working families with children have declined since the late 1970s, even though the overall U.S. homeownership rate has risen, according to a study released Tuesday by an affordable housing coalition.

This article cites a new report by the Center for Housing Policy that documents that all the media hype about rising home ownership disguises the fact that home ownership for families with kids is dropping, especially those in poorer families:

In 1978, 70.5 percent of families with children owned their homes. In 2001, the share was 68.4 percent. And, low- to moderate-income working families with children were hit particularly hard. In 1978, 62.5 percent of all such families owned their homes. In 2001, their homeownership rate was just 56.6 percent.

Essentially, this means that the rise in housing prices is benefitting richer folks, while leaving many poor families further behind.

Yet the Bush administration is advocating further cutting federal funds for rent subsidies for working families left behind in this housing cost crunch.

Posted by Nathan at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (0)

Iraq Torture Scandal Spreads

It's not a good idea to torture press employees:

U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Drip, drip, drip...

More drip, drip here.

Posted by Nathan at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Supreme Court Created Jim Crow

On the 50th anniversary, the conventional wisdom is that Brown v. Board of Education represented the moment when our nation realized that the majority could not be trusted with individual rights, that democracy had failed for the black minority and we needed unelected judges to save us.

Which is just bad history.

What the Supreme Court did was save us from unelected Senators, who had been put there by unelected judges on the Supreme Court back in the 1870s-- when those judged killed the Reconstruction laws that protected minority rights in the South.

Majority Supported Civil Rights: First, the lie that the Supreme Court acted against majority will back in 1954. I wrote about this two years ago in a column, Remembering the Popular Will for Civil Rights. In fact, there were strong majorities in our nation to end Jim Crow segregation. Repeatedly, the House of Representatives by large majorities passed legislation in the 1940s to end the poll tax. The Dixiecrats walked out of the Democratic Party in 1948 because of its strong civil rights plank. And by the mid-1950s, the House was repeatedly passing legislation to ban segregation in public schools, along with ending segregation in other private businesses.

The only thing that stopped this legislation from becoming law was a minority of southern Senators who filibustered the laws. And those Senators were not democratically elected. They were only in office because lynchings and racist voting laws prevented the black population from voting.

And the reason the Southern states got away with this racist election system was the Supreme Court itself.

After the Civil War, the House AND Senate, elected under new Reconstruction laws that protected the right to vote, passed laws to prevent both government disenfranchisement and private Klan-style harassment of voters. That Reconstruction government also passed laws prohibiting any public or private segregation in hotels, restaurants, or any other kind of public accomodation.

Were those laws democratically repealed?

No.

The Supreme Court repealed them and plunged the South into nearly a century of lynchings and Jim Crow. Starting almost immediately after the Civil War and culminating in 1876, that Supreme Court declared that laws passed by the elected Congress were invalid.

The Cruikshank Decision: The culmination was the 1875 Cruikshank decision- which declared that the US government could not prosecute private murder meant to overthrow southern Reconstruction governments. The case dated from the Colfax Massacre, an 1873 mass murder of 100 blacks who were defending their county courthouse from a white mob who overthrew the local government by violence.

And the US Supreme Court declared that the US government had no power to stop private rightwing violence meant to overthrow these state governments or to prevent individuals from voting.

The results were predictable. Licensed by the courts, Klan-like terrorism spread across the South, killing blacks and their supporters, suppressing their votes, and taking over southern governments. And, of course, replacing democratically elected Senators in favor of civil rights with the pro-segregation Senators who would represent the region into the 1950s.

To repeat, the democratically elected Congress had passed voting rights laws and anti-segregation laws in THE 1870s. It was an unelected Court which repealed them and put in place racist Senators throughout the South.

So it is the Supreme Court that is to blame for the racist Senators who resisted civil rights in the 1950s.

The Supreme Court deserves credit for beginning to clean up the racist mess their brethren had created in the past, but institutionally, Jim Crow and the Klan are the legacy of abuse of power by the Supreme Court.

So look at Brown and think about the dangers of unelected Court power, not its usefulness.

Posted by Nathan at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (1)

Apartheid Mecenaries in Iraq

A decade after the end of white rule, the war in Iraq is reminding South Africans of yet another uncomfortable legacy from the brutal days of apartheid -- South Africa's role in providing mercenaries to a wide range of military causes across the globe.

Hundreds of former South African soldiers and police officers are serving in Iraq now as private security contractors. Some are among the private guards for L. Paul Bremer, chief U.S. envoy to Iraq, and patrol the Green Zone, where the U.S. command has its headquarters.

So at least we know that Saddam's henchmen will have employment in the future. Obviously plenty of work for fascist murderers in the US mercenary brigades.

Posted by Nathan at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Good Idea from Governator

When juries award damages to a plaintiff, the money awarded is supposed to do two things:
(1) Compensate the plaintiff for actual harm, including money damages and pain and suffering;
(2) Award additional punitive damages against defendants who have deliberately endangered the broader public.

The theory on punitive damages is that if defendants pay only the harm caused to specific plaintiffs, they may calculate that, since they aren't caught each time, they can continue the same behavior; occasional jury payouts become just the cost of doing business.

Punitive damages are essentially a standin for the damage done to other potential plaintiffs who never had the energy or understanding to go through a long drawn-out trial.

In a sense, punitive damages are equivalent to fines regularly assessed against companies when the government brings a lawsuit in order to deter bad acts. But if punitive damages represent a social assessment for broader harm against the public, the quirk of the system is that the plaintiff gets to keep the money really meant for the broader public.

So the Governator has the right idea to take 75% of punitiive damages for the state government.

This will improve the debate on punitive damages. Right now, when large judgements are made against a defendant, the question is whether this is too large a "jackpot" for the plaintiff. Now, the question will be whether the the broader public has been fairly compensated for the overall social harm by the defendant, an assessment that would justify far larger judgements.

For this reason, I expect big business lobbyists to join opposition to the proposal by trial lawyers (who would lose a chunk of income). On the other hand, a number of states already have a version of the proposal in place:

Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon and Utah already collect as much as 75 percent of punitive awards. And though there is no such law in Ohio, judges there recently gave one-third of a $27.5 million punitive award to a public university's cancer research fund.

So here's one fight I hope Arnie wins.

Posted by Nathan at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | Track (7)

Rise of the Jackboots

The Patriot Act was not enough. Now, the Bush administration is trying to use an obscure law against "sailormongering"; (a 19th century law against illegally boarding a ship to recruit sailors) to chill free speech by Greenpeace. After a typical action against a ship hauling illegal mahogany, the government is now seeking to indict the whole organization on criminal charges:

Not once since the Boston Tea Party have U.S. authorities criminally prosecuted a group for political expression.

"It's ominous," said attorney Maria Kayanan of law firm Podhurst Orseck, which worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on a "friend of court" brief to back a Greenpeace demand that the government reveal who ordered the prosecution.

"It will be very chilling because advocacy groups whose members chose to engage in acts of protest which happen to violate the law will be loathe to act at all."

And in the "we saw this coming" category, a Bronx gang is being indicted; under the state "terrorism" law for nasty but typical thuggery.

From here it's just a short step to indicting Greenpeace and other opposition groups for terrorism. After all, they're involved in rampant "sailormongering."

Send them to Gitmo!

Posted by Nathan at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (0)

Torture Isolated? Look at US Prisons

Even the dark humor on late night comparing Iraq to horrible conditions in US prisons reflect a hard truth-- Prison Torture Begins at Home:

Remember the disturbing 1996 videotape of naked prisoners crawling on their bellies in a Texas jail as they were hit with batons, kicked and in some cases bitten by German-shepherds?

Do you recall Corcoran State Prison, where eight guards were accused in 1997 of staging gladiator-like fights between inmates, then shooting and killing some of them in the name of prison security?

And who can forget Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, raped with a stick in the custody of New York City's finest that same year?

Or this Human Rights Watchpage on prison abuse or Amnesty International on police brutality in the US.

Posted by Nathan at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Bush ReLost Vietnam

Why is the prison torture scandal do devastating for Bush's Iraq policy? Even if responsibility isn't proved at the highest levels, he's still lost. The collective shame and embarassment has undermined the fundamental goal of the neoconservatives-- getting America to be proud of US military power in a way they have never been since Vietnam.

Some on the Right have that obvious cowboy arrogance of asserting US power because we can, but many liberals and moderates initially supported the war because of the promise that this war, this war, would redeem America, fight a Bad Guy, stop Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Bring Democracy to Iraq. And most of all, we'd be welcomed as the Good Guys, putting to rest the shame of Vietnam.

Well, we beat the Bad Guy, but the rest...No weapons of mass destruction-- a lie by the administration. Democracy in Iraq-- seemingly a mirage amidst warring factions and insurgencies. And no flowers for our soldiers, just road sign bombs.

And then the prison torture pictures-- Mai Lai all over again. Suddenly, we are right back in Vietnam, ashamed of our soldiers and ashamed of our political leaders who put those soldiers in such terrible places that they'd do such terrible things.

Maybe the abuses are isolated-- although evidence indicates it was not. Or maybe mistakes, not deliberate policies, led to conditions that made these problems chronic.

It doesn't matter.

We can slog along now in Iraq, but it now stinks of lies and shame. We won't be able to collectively think of Iraq without seeing those images of hooded prisoners and smirking soldiers. Which means we won't want to think about it a lot. Kind of like Vietnam.

The neoconservatives lost.

Many liberals jumped off their train just before the war started as our allies denounced our unilateralism. Most of the rest jumped off when it became clear we had no serious plan for reconstruction and allowed looting and power outages to dominate the post-Saddam "liberation."

And moderates began exiting the station as lies about "yellowcake" uranimum and WMDs became obvious.

But the shame of Abu Ghraib leaves many "paleocon" or just decent conservatives denouncing their neocon allies for taking the US into one more shameful adventure.

Bush ReLost Vietnam. The American people can forgive many things, but making us ashamed of ourselves-- that they won't forgive.

Posted by Nathan at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (1)

Bush Poll Numbers Collapse

This is a deadly poll for Bush:

President Bush's overall approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, 44 percent, in the latest CBS News poll.

Not surprisingly given the events of the last few weeks, the population now see Iraq as a disaster:

The highest figure ever recorded, 64 percent, say the result of the war in Iraq has not been worth the cost in lives or money. Only 29 percent, the lowest figure yet, believe the war has been worth it. And just 31 percent of Americans now say the United States is winning the war.

Worse for Bush, they think the goals of the war might have been a good idea; they just see Bush's leadership as a failure:

the public remains split on whether the United States should have taken military action against Iraq in the first place: 49 percent think it was the right decision, 45 percent think it was not.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans now disapprove of the president's handling of the war in Iraq, while 39 percent approve.

Which means that much of the public doesn't think the Iraq war had to be a mistake. They just think Bush screwed it all up with his arrogance and incompetence.

But the most interesting number is on Bush's handling of the economy. Despite all the statistical noise saying how well the economy is doing, the public isn't buying Bush's economic leadership:

American's opinion of Mr. Bush's handling of the economy is also at an all-time low, 34 percent, while 60 percent disapprove, also a high of the Bush presidency.

Are the Iraq disapproval numbers leaking over to the economic numbers? Partially, no doubt.

Or maybe after years of job losses and stagnant growth, Americans aren't buying "mission accomplished" based on a couple of nice monthly job reports.

Without having to know the details, they know the present economy is on steroids-- artificially low interest rates, massive federal deficit spending, and large infusions of military buying.

And yet they all know that the job market is still enemic and wages are still under pressure from corporate union busting and global markets.

So they don't buy the present economy as any kind of economic miracle. And 60% blame poor leadership by Bush.

Put a fork in him. Bush is done.

Posted by Nathan at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Track (0)

Indian Poor Reject Pro-Market Party

There's been a vibrant debate in comments in whether recent neoliberal policies in Indian have been a success, but poor Indian voters seem to have registered their own opinions in voting out the incumbent party.

The results reflected the feeling by millions of India's rural poor that they had been left out of the economic boom promoted by Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party-led government...

Congress focused its campaign on the country's 300 million people who still live on less than a dollar a day. It hammered away at the lack of even basic infrastructure, electricity and potable water for millions of rural poor...

Leftist parties, which have promised to support a Congress-led government, also appeared to be doing well and they could give the opposition the edge it would need to take power.

This is the reality of the global economy-- a small group are getting very rich, a larger group or doing pretty well, but large swathes of the population are suffering under neoliberal policies that undermine incomes for the poor and leave education and social services underfunded.

Hopefully, the vote in India, in combination with the rejection of neoliberalism throughout much of Latin America, will reshape the global debate on trade and development towards demands for a more humane global economic system.

Posted by Nathan at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | Track (1)

This is Damning

This story is not as dramatic as the torture pictures, but is in some ways more damning. The video diary of the soldier shows criminal callousness towards prisoners under her charge:

"We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet."

"This is a sand viper," she said. "One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about."

But the real damning part is that other soldiers involved in abuse of prisoners knew this was a fucked up attitude and recognized her own attitude and behavior was driven by having two few soldiers guarding too many prisoners, with little support from the top brass.

Fellow soldier Lisa Girman, who was discharged with Canjar, said commanders ignored the problems at Camp Bucca.

She complained of "the ignorance of the chain of command not to listen to the person who was actually on the front line."

Girman's and Canjar's families tried to draw attention to the problems at Camp Bucca last year. They called Rumsfeld's office repeatedly and talked to his staff, but got no response, CBS said. Their letters to the White House and two senators were also unanswered.

Sure, these folks are trying to justify their own behavior, but so is Rumsfeld and the top command who let it all happen.

Posted by Nathan at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)